I once thought of marriage as an exoplanet
in the habitable zone of another star; I knew
it was capable of sustaining life, I just didn’t
want to live there. I’d taken astronomy lessons
from my mom’s copy of Men Are from Mars,
Women Are from Venus. How tidy the binary
seemed back then, before scientists had even
identified the planets which circle two stars.
One Christmas, my parents gave me a telescope,
but on the clearest nights of that new year,
the scope wasn’t strong enough to see beyond
the orange dome above our street-lit suburb.
Now, instead of the moon, I study my balding head
in the mirror, the alien topography of lumps
and moles inevitably receding to those mornings
with my father at Magicuts in the back
of the Zellers, where a woman with blue eyelids
and bangs teased high as tidal waves tried to tame
my cowlick. “This one’s going to be a heartbreaker,”
she’d say, and even then I understood the promise
was for my father’s benefit, a flirtation in the form
of the prologue to a novel of which I was neither
author nor protagonist. The first Easter after
my father moved out, he brought me a book
about Apollo 13. The astronauts, stranded in space,
had slingshot around the far side of the moon
and returned to Earth. Family became a system
while I maintained a hyperbolic orbit, with the escape
velocity to travel beyond the pull of the sun,
the moon, and the outer planets, like Voyager II
without its golden disc or instruments. Astronomers
call it a merger, the collision of two objects in space,
but whatever constellation we’ve formed,
we call ours a marriage. It’s less discovery than
keeping on, as when he shaves my head each week,
marking time by my hairline’s slow retreat.
Kevin Shaw lives in Ottawa. His poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, CV2, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Smaller Hours, is available from icehouse poetry (Goose Lane Editions).
